Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!glacier!bridge2!pvf
From: pvf@bridge2.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16
Subject: Atari BBS and Download in ASCII format
Message-ID: <186@bridge2.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-May-86 17:21:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: bridge2.186
Posted: Mon May 12 17:21:42 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 14-May-86 21:46:53 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Bridge Communications, Inc., Mountain View, Ca
Lines: 31

I had been waiting several weeks for my PD terminal program to
arrive.  When I heard about the Atari BBS, I could stand it no
longer, deciding that I could write a simple terminal emulator
with ASCII download capability pretty quickly myself.  Well,
Friday night I tried it.  On my first attempt, none of the
downloaded files would run, all giving "TOS Error 34" or
something like that.  I took out my trusty disk utility program
and compared one of the downloaded programs with a program
prepared locally.  Well, it seemed that there was an extra byte
at the start of every downloaded file that was pushing the
remainder of the file off.  Admittedly, I did not have a great
deal of evidence supporting me, but I decided to try simply
discarding out the extraneous byte.  VOILA, working programs!
I was actually so surprised myself that I very carefully looked
through the code for my "terminal emulator" (including the
compiler's assembly output) and it really seems that the errant
character is comming from the BBS.

Anybody know what the garbage character is or why it is there
(incidentally, the character seemed always to be 0x12)?

Other than that, I am really happy to have a hook into Atari for
PD software.  There are some really cute things available, and
it was well worth the work.  (I am especially pleased as I live 
in Mountain View, the next town over from Sunnyvale, so the phone
call is cheap.)

Thank you Neil!

Paul Fries
Mountain View, CA